14.2 Historical Stages in the Development of Feminism
Valentin Quintus Nicolescu and Gregory Millard
In 1968, Martha Weinman Lear used the metaphor of feminist “waves” to indicate different historical periods in feminist thought and activism (1968, p. 24) . While this metaphor has been criticized as Eurocentric and dismissive of women’s struggles prior to the modern era, it has nonetheless become a standard way of understanding the evolution of feminism. We consider four waves of feminism below.
